Grady High School is finally making the grade and should be taken off Mayor Bloomberg’s list of struggling schools slated for closure, students, parents, and teachers demanded last week, claiming that the Brighton Beach school’s evaluation scores have jumped from a D to a B in just two years.

“It’s a huge improvement,” said Jane Marziliano, who led a rally in front of William E. Grady Career and Technical School — where her son is a junior — last week, calling for the school to be spared. “The school is fantastic now. It’s outrageous that the city wants to close it.”

The Department of Education plans to shutter the Brighton Fourth Street school this summer and resurrect it as a “turnaround school” with a new name and overhauled staff.

City officials claim that Grady has never been grade-A material: it received a D on its city-issued report card in 2010 — a less-than-stellar score that made it one of the state’s “persistently low achieving” schools.

The city put Grady in a federally funded transformation program that would have brought up to $2 million to the school over three years to improve its performance and tapped Principal Geraldine Maione — who parents credit for the school’s improved scores — to oversee the transition, but the funding never materialized: the city and the United Federation of Teachers failed to agree on a teacher evaluation system, prompting Bloomberg to scrap the federal program in favor of the city’s new turnaround school model.

Under the new model, federal dollars will still come to Grady, but only after the school fires 50 percent of its staff. John Dewey High School and Sheepshead Bay High School are also among the 33 public schools that have been singled out for what some see as a cut-throat program.

But Maione said Grady, which was opened in 1958 as an all-boys school before going co-ed in the early 1990s, should be taken off the list because its performance has improved.

Reader Feedback

Concerned Citizen from Gravesend says:

Shame on the City for seeking to close schools like Grady High School. Geraldine Maione, the Principal of Grady has turned the school around. She is a dedicated, compassionate and concerned educator. The City failed to meet their commitment to Grady and similar schools and than they look to close the schools. The City's answer is to close the schools and do something they call a "turnaround model," bringing in a new wave of talent when in fact, they fail to see the current talent that is in place. Being a teacher and being an educator is a difficult task, especially when the City fails to support its workforce. The Panel for Education Policy should open its eyes to see what is working and not attempt to reinvent the wheel.

March 13, 2012, 8:59 am

it is i from brooklyn says:

It is the DOE, under mayoral control, that is failing the schools. Bloomberg's education policies are an abysmal failure.

March 19, 2012, 1:04 pm

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